Abstract

[First Paragraph] Mesolithic Europe holds a special place in our imagination. Perhaps more than any other region and period, it is unique in conjuring up a strange sense of both 'otherness' and familiarity. The people who lived here were in many ways fundamentally different from ourselves. As hunters and gatherers, their experience, worldview, and knowledge could not be further from ours. In our imagination, we can conjure up images of how these people might have looked or felt, but even some of the most basic elements of their existence or perception, something far more knowable in later periods, are things of which we know little. The physical world in which they lived is somehow more tangible but, like its people, familiar and yet fundamentally distinct from our own experience. This was a place with landscapes that were vast and, to our minds, untamed, familiar to our experience at a local scale, yet at the same time extending over seemingly immense territories with swathes of dark forests, mountains, and relentlessly rising seas.